When night breaks solemn over the mountainside, and the lake is a sheet of glass, a mirror full of the millions of stars which flit and glitter so – silence too, comes with it. But it is not the pleasant silence of a summer night, with the distant ebb of the cricket hymns and the breeze shuddering the pines. It is an unsettled quiet, a tense quiet, one which waits as one holds their breath and waits, and sweats, and bleeds, folded beneath the shadow of a sword. It is a beautiful sight despite this enlightening sensation – the stars, each a light amongst lights burning brighter than recalled, fill the lake until it can hold no more. It brims with them, weighs down with them, a heavy thing to beholden; it is still because it must be, because exhaustion may find it were it to move, to break, to force off those things that have swelled it to its capacity. Galaxies are stead in its grasp, whorling and impenetrable by the practicality of the mind, a cluster of sisters gaze into their reflection from their heavenly throne. Somewhere beyond them, a deadened galaxy waits as a black hole, a gaping eye observant and patient. A chaise, a grand niche, a seating fit for a god, or something much more terrible.
He arrives when Vitreus is at its quietest, or the quiet arrives with him – bade, as though knelt to the very sound of his approach, under foot and under world. A vagrant thing, a wraith shrouded in the webbing tangles of glistening aether from the contours of his image; each golden vein reflects within them, or absorbs the brilliance of, the countless myriad stars. Beneath them shadows dance and the crescent moon bows, nurturing and gentle, or sharp and curious as a hungry scythe, to cast a wan light along the reticulated length of his spine. His symmetry waxes and wanes – wolfish, prowling, the roughened angles and the curve of muscle that rove, moonlight tender across the broad stretch of his shoulders and the tone of his core; laid bare beneath the watch of night and its steady roam. Uninvited, a godless wretch, he sacrileges the stillness of the Vitreus Lake when he enters, ripples unraveled from the coursing blade of his likeness – peeled, as though by the undoing of a wound, and poisoned by the stretch of shadow which consume the reflection of the amorous Pleiades and embracing starlight which fades beneath his silhouette.
There he bathes in the waters of Vitreus, consumed by starlight and unwinding shadows that glint and shimmer, a celestial undertow, centered by a black hole. There, he closes his eyes and dreams of things gentler creatures dare not – his mane unwound in the soft, slow ripples, his shoulders eased to the coolness of the lake and the quiet of the night.
big fire, big burn into the ashes of no return
12-06-2020, 09:30 AM
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Obsidian [PM] Posts: 70 — Threads: 5 Signos: 25
She walks across the dimpled beach, marked by the footprints of strangers, come down upon the shore to relish the summer heat. Firelight dances in the droplets of seawater that drip from her obsidian skin. Leto turns a dark head to watch the revellers. The clack of bones within her salt-matted hair is an elegy against the jaunty tunes that peel from elegant instruments.
Leto is a black smudge upon the moonsoaked beach. There is no part of her tempted to join in this night. Their music is too light, it lacks for her the heartbeat thump of deeper music, that sings into her tribal limbs.
The stars glitter in the sky, swallowed by her galaxy eyes. They are a whirlpool of twisting worlds, swirls of pinks and silvers and blues. The thousand stars twisting into the eternity of her gaze, run liquid and flammable in her veins. Her blood is the white gasoline of stars and from their perches high above, they glimmer like silver flames, each one a spark threatening to turn her into wicked star-fire.
The sounds of the beach party are swallowed by the hissing of the tide as it breaks upon the sand. The further the kelpie wanders in land, the quieter the world becomes. Hush, hush, it whispers as she passes. hush, hush it trembles as moonlight limns her lips in silver and drowns her mouth in starlight.
He stands, a heathen shape amidst the quiet sanctity of the star-struck lake. The water is a liquid canvas, a perfect medium, stars flung across its face, the pregnant moon peering down, down to gaze vainly upon its perfect image. Leto’s eyes trail up the unbeliever’s horns that point up to that star-strung sky and seem to yearn to prick the night as if it were skin, and watch how Caligo’s night bleeds, her magic unspooling at the command of his wretched horns.
The kelpie turns from him, prowls away from where his moonshadow reaches for her toes, to turn her black skin darker yet. But Leto’s blood is already warming. It runs faster, hotter in her veins. It builds like white lava beneath her ink-black skin. The stars begin their song, their trembling wicked magic as they shudder themselves loose from the webbing black that holds them still as flies. Can he hear the way the night-stars begin their droning, their consuming light, Leto’s magic rattling them loose as a fly’s wings strive against sticky silk.
Leto turns into the lake, the breaks its bank, its perfect stillness like a ship tipping into the sea. The magic has ignited in her veins, they set her veins glowing white, white, white. They cut the black of her skin into webbed cracks from white star-bright light pours out. The kelpie burns, burns as she steps into the water that hisses with the celestial heat of her body. A soft hiss fills the lake, rippling out upon its banks. Denocte’s lake bubbles about her glowing hips, her glowing abdomen and steam rises as water turns to gas.
She stops as the water rises to lick along the swell of her ribs. Only then does she turn her shed-star eyes upon the unholy man cut through with golden rivulets, a gilded answer to her starbright blood.
He does not dream of her but when her body divides the waters like a searing comet breaking the atmosphere, he cannot help but dream of the eating of worlds, the division of milky ways, the carving of a star as it screams, burning, splintering anew and changing evermore. Her veins sing a song like the one he has only ever known – syllables remiss, but a hymn resounds like bone-white heat stinging in the night; it is not the cadence of stones or the cries of no-brained creatures coursing through the shadow of a red sun. It is not the guttural psalm of a dying planet but a chorale of things risen, things blistered, things breaking a sky, a heaven, the singsong lilt of a falcon splitting clouds in its crescendo. It is a sound not unlike a hot blade belting a deafening chime, a croon unto death or a chorus of victory stirred from visceral quarters yet. He is envious before he wakes from this unrest to witness her, because that which becomes Erasmus is not yet – and never will be, and may never again hear such a song sung for him the way her veins sing for her, for power, for her hunger rising like a choir.
His bones only hum with the echo of remembrance and the sting of mortality abated, waiting like pale teeth in the dark grating sharp on wet stone flashes. Flesh crawls, and that chill climbs down the spine and down the gullet and down into the pit of enmity that only knows the rolling heat of appetite, parasite. Her outline is burned into the dark of his eyelids and when they shutter back on their hinges – he cannot be disappointed. She stands to the waters as an idol stands the course of weather on its pedestal, brilliant and restless and glorious and invincible. And though Erasmus, the whole of him and it now, does not kneel or bow as one may to such idols, he bears her with a certain esteem she warrants; if it is not awe it is a wordless, grinless admiration. They speak not as animals or men or stars or anything quite so compact for flesh or bone or death, but as an understanding of stellar forms, eldritch and true, one soul honoring another.
As one unhallowed monster to another, eyes and teeth and fangs in the night. Go on, they glint, careening, sharp and jagged, silent as a tomb. Make of me what you will.
When he looks to her then with hunger stirring in his core, he cannot help but watch as the waters boil around her, and the shifting steam cast shadows across the brine on the curve of her back like the eclipse of a thousand moons. She is a reflection of the cosmos then – but more brilliant, blindingly deft as carved starsong and cruel brightness. He wonders if he were to open her throat to him the way her veins open to her, if she would taste like the undoing of stars, or the mergeance of celestial bodies. Touching his lips to the silver surface of the lake, he smooths them along the white line of her neck's reflection, and wonders also if she would be his undoing, then. Would she carve him of hot whiteness burning like the thousand suns he's devoured? When he raises his head again, his mane falls in dark waves against his neck, the fibers dulled in the shadow of her luster, his horns framing the crescent moon.
Aether, iridescent blackness, shifting inky green and violet and indigo as basking in the heat of her light, skims the waters between them. They ghost, shadows curling against one another like the roll of oceanic currents wrought; crashing, withdrawn, crashing, pulsing, sighing, hound tongues licking the glow of her shine. They yearn along her curves, gather their black eyes in the shallow salt-glass of ocean droplets, pressing meekly along the length of her spine, gathered back to the steaming waters to draw languidly along her hips. Were he a god – for such creatures were vain things, vain and arrogant and contemptible – perhaps he would have laughed then, a sound that was cruel as winter and light as spring, and sought to open her brightness unto him. To devour. To carve. To drink and drink and drink and on, never knowing an end.
Instead, the sharp contours of his expression shift, something amiable or adoring, or awful and hungry, or all of which may be accounted. The moon casts a thin line down the length of his nose, broadens across the angles of his high cheekbone, curving devilishly with the line of his lips. Stars cluster at the square of his shoulders, the tuck of his waist, ever watchful Sisters bright-eyed and wanton. "Does it feel like burning?" just barely over the decibels of a whisper, wind through a briar, an utterance so smooth and low and full it is unearthly, humming: "Does it feel like resurgence?" Purred like a lion with a bloody mouth.
He moves, the silhouette of his shadowed body unpainting itself from the shadow-scape into which he blends. Leto binds him in tangled galaxies as she watches his prowl toward the water’s edge.
It is only a moment longer where he is a feast for her eyes alone. As soon as he reaches the lake’s edge the surface etches him in rippling, reflected moonlight. It captures the underneath of his jaw, its line like the mountain’s edge at his back. In the darkness his eyes gleam, with the sparks of a dying sun swallowing all as it swells outward, outward. Behind the twisting galaxies of her eyes she wonders what the darkness might be like if she were swallowed by his gold.
Within her hair the strung bones clack with ritual music that charges the air. The still canvas of the lake’s surface shatters like glass as he steps down into the inky black pool. Ripples race across the water, breaking in warning upon her knees, turning to steam in the boiling water at her sides.
Upon his body her eyes follow the maps of gold, branching out like the seams of universes, held together with the golden glue of time. Beneath the thick bow of her lashes she watches him, a lion studying a tiger. Slow, slow are his lips as they lower to her reflection and run along the rippling curve of her neck. A shiver slips down her throat and her ears fall upon the tangle of her hair. Corvid, her head tilts and after a moment she smiles, small, dangerous. A hunger stalks along the crescent moon curve of her lips. It plays a feral song against the star-bright glow of her teeth (though she keeps them behind tight lips that curl as an archer’s bow ready, ready…).
Bells ring in the silent night and they are barely silenced before he speaks. In quiet contemplation of his words, her own lips lower to the water that ripples from his body. Her lips feel the whispers the water presses upon their ebony skin. She feels the secrets they tell of his warm skin, his gold that he leached from gods and the endlessness of worlds.
Between them the steam from her curls and rises like a prayer to an unknown god. SHe is the incense upon the altar. She is the litany of prayer uttered on lips and rolling with the sweeping rhythm of the sigils that swirl innate and ancient across her skin. Hers is a song of death and dying, injustice and hungering vengeance.
Does it feel like burning? He asked.
“Yes.” She says, speaking in starfire and, oh, how the celestial bodies bend at her voice and the sweeping hand of her magic. This burning is as a phoenix - it is life and it is death and Leto stands in its midst, suspended, dangerous and bright. “But not like drowning. Drowning was worse.”
Already her lungs tighten with the memory of how they died, how the water demanded their change. The shed-star pushes her way through the water. It swirls at her knees, rushing out to break in white bubbles along the rocks of his hips and the crags of his ribs. She stalks closer, closer. In one blink a witch, the next a priest, the third a god, the fourth just a girl, cut through by light, painted by earthen magic and carved out of the rough stone of an underground cave. Leto moves to him, bringing earth and sky and sea upon her, within her, about her.
Her eyes chase the line of moonlight that pours down the curve of his nose and pools to drip from his lips. They take in the sharp of his cheekbone as dangerous as the bonebridge that lead across to the Glowstone City island. “Yes,” the kelpie breathes again, vehemence pouring hot and scalding as the light from between her rips and the cracks of her body.
“And you…” the witch murmurs, drinking in the sight of him, etching in the sight of it. “Have you bathed in the blood of gods?” Her chin tips up, up, up to the sky as if to see the stars roaring with the story of a deceased god. They are silent, silent. She does not know whether to be disappointed or delighted.
The taste of blood upon his lips turns the air sweet. Leto licks her lips as her stomach yearns and feels the way hunger stirs and begins to prowl between her ribs.
